><< don't think that I as suggesting that the origin of profit is in
>exchange, but in an economy dominated by monopolies profits will be
>higher than in a competitive economy, ceterus paribus. >>
justin writes:
>But doesn't that mean that the origin of SOME profit is in exchange,a s
>Marx indeed suggests in the chapter on differential rent in CIII (hsi
>duisdcussion of the waterfall)?
My reading of the discussion of the waterfall -- and Marx's theory of rent
in general -- is that the waterfall "creates" surplus-value _for the owner
of the waterfall_ but not for society as a whole. One of Marx's major
points is that the different kinds of property income (profits, interest,
rent) do not come from physical commodities (capital goods, money, land)
but from exploited labor. Those who receive rent get it because they
control resources giving them special advantages that allow them to capture
part of society's surplus-value, but the latter springs from the
surplus-labor done by workers in production.
The key role of circulation is to "redistribute" surplus-value, i.e. to
cause individual capitalist claims on the societal surplus-value (in money
terms) to differ from the contributions of the individual capitalists'
production processes to the societal surplus-value. (This is just as when a
firm with a high organic composition of capital is able to claim more
surplus-value than those with a low organic composition of capital so that
the rate of profit can be equalized -- or as when unproductive sectors such
as FIRE can claim part of the societal surplus-value without making any
contribution to the societal pool.) See my 1990 article on the "labor
theory of value" in RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY.
BTW, circulation is also crucial to the aggregate realization of the
surplus-value that's produced.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine/AS
